both volumes of 'the road' box set is beyond belief really. the first two discs I don't return to all that often, yeah, but the real surprise is the amount of completely composed material throughout, they had enough for 3-4 additional studio albums. the other thing is just how much absurdly ON IT they were as a live band, the live versions of familiar pieces are just completely on fire, they just tear it all to shreds

so anyone worried that this 10 disc box set is mostly like the ambient / completely abstract side of what they do, nope, it is split 50/50 between abstract freeform & compositions that are so good it is just confusing that it took until the 30th anniversary for them to come out

He's not 'obviously right' at all. Some of the things he says are right, but certainly not all, and the conclusions he draws from some things do not necessarily follow.

This piece from Records on Ribs is a great contribution to the debate as far as I'm concerned: To Free or Not to Free. (Full disclosure: I do know them, but that doesn't mean I agree with everything they say here - I just think it's a very well considered addition to the subject.)

Not sure if this is being patronising, but the 'end of history' thing is a reference to Fukuyama's book, in which he claims our state of Western capitalist democracy is indeed the end point of cultural evolution.

No problem - for what's worth, I find Fukuyama and his Hegelian mannerisms pretty simplistic too. Still the idea of a society based on "gift economies, common ownership and mutual aid" seems to me wishful thinking, at the same time beautiful and slightly terrifying.

Cutler's response was actually written a few years ago in response to filesharing and repurposed as a response to Kenny's column but it's still a live topic

"As Cutler notes, plumbers do not work for free. But capitalism is not the end of history and perhaps one day plumbers will work for free"

this struck me as a slightly patronizing tone to take towards the individual who wrote the lyrics for "In Praise Of Learning" & "The World As It Is Today" but the Internet means that the conversation usually gotten started before a round of formal introductions. I agree that RoR's (ha ha) idealism is kind of charming but Cutler's been living in the real world for a few decades

as the owner who started what I basically consider to be the most important independent art music label of the 80's and early 90's, Cutler gets to hardline his points -- I learned the canon of most of what I consider to be important through Recommended Records' catalog during that time, and there was no one -- no one else keeping this music in print at that time.

Anyone interested in Henry Cow, Univers Zero, Samla, Magma...basically any experimental prog, needs to watch this and contribute to this documentary. They have all the major players, and the story needs to be told, and out there for all to see.

Listening to Unrest now for the first time. I think I understand how this is In Opposition; quite clearly, in fact. The very hills, the hedges, the birds, they are all rising to face the oppressor. Ancient, paganistic squalls of defiance; beauty and savage horror.

Never made the connection back in '87 when Children of God came out. It was only when I was comparing that record with the first Comus album on ilx that Marcello pointed out to me that *she played with both bands*!

been really broke recently so i haven't been able to get a ticket for the barbican thing yet, but i am seeing the artaud beats at a little local festival tomorrow and i'm pretty excited about that. just watched a few videos and fuck, yumi is a monster

Just finished listening to to Western Culture and so also finished the studio box set. Desperate Straights was my favourite by far but it seemed to be far more of a Slapp Happy album than a Henry Cow one. I enjoyed the rest but never really loved them, might have to return to them in years ahead. I did particularly like "Beautiful As The Moon", "Half The Sky" and "Nine Funerals Of The Citizen King". Love Dagmar Krause's voice.

Definitely want to get the Art Bears album.

I once saw Cutler saying that Henry Cow was way more of a live band. Does that mean the live albums are better? I don't think I could go for the two live box sets. Too much.

There's some live HC (maybe SH/HC because Dagmar sings) youtubes that are very good. Search for the ones recorded at a place called Veysey (or Vesey, I think) in Switzerland (or is it France?). It's probably a good hour in total, and includes the "Beautiful as the Moon, Terrible as an Army With Banners" piece from Concerts.

The dvd of Vevey was in the Live box set. I haven't heard if any of that box was available separately since, apart from the first disc if you payed on the instalment plan. So even that option may be gone now. Would think they might make more money by having discs available separately especially the dvd which is pretty Recommended, as are the rest of These

I highly recommend the two live Henry Cow boxed sets (40th anniversary) - if you are thinking of splurging, do it. (Same with the Art Bears box.) Studio HC is great, but live HC is insanely awe-inspiring. Bob Drake did an *incredible* job on the sound for the boxes. On this page, Bob talks about the meticulous and painstaking work he did to get the absolute best mix of HC's cover of "We Did It Again": http://www.bordebasse.fr/henrycow/wavs/index.htm

"Somewhere along the way I noticed that the two versions I had of this song were actually two different recordings of the same performance. The one I'll call version 1 sounds like a portable cassette recording from the audience point of view close to the stage. It has a lot of audience reaction, a lot of guitar, thin-sounding drums and bass, and only a faint echo of the vocals. Version 2 sounds like a desk recording and has almost no guitar, but plenty of drums, bass, and vocals. (The sax isn't very present on either.) Once I noticed they were the same performance I thought I could combine them to get the best of both. The tricky thing was that the audience recording runs much faster than the desk recording, and I couldn't simply resample it to the same pitch/speed because it wasn't a consistent difference. You'd immediately hear the flanging effect as the two recordings drifted out of synch. This is always a problem when synching analog recordings so I wasn't surprised, but this was made extra difficult because of the extremely jittery speed of the cassette recording. So I chopped it (version 1) into very short segments of perhaps 1/4 to 1/2 second length, resampling each segment seperately and manually synching them with the desk recording. It took a while, was it worth it...I don't care, I just had to do it!"

Henry Cow's "Stockholm and Goteborg" is part of that sale, so there's a low-cost entry point to the 40th anniversary live boxes. Also, I see two Art Bears discs there.

I just splurged on that sale and got a ton of Bob Drake, Sun Ra, the two News from Babel discs (finally), Lindsay Cooper's "Rags/The Golddiggers," a bunch from The Work (Tim H.'s post-HC band), The Necks, etc. It is absolutely insane how much quality stuff is on that sale list.

Nice to hear but the "News From Babel" portion of the set really blows away the Henry Cow portion. It's kind of weird how Henry Cow specifically got canonized in a way the frequently superior post-Cow projects by various alumni didn't.